ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey told the Vatican’s ambassador on Sunday it was “deeply sorry and disappointed” that Pope Francis had called the 1915 mass killings in Armenia a genocide, an official said, adding the pope’s comments had caused a “problem of trust”.

The pope made the comments earlier in the day during a Mass marking the 100th anniversary of the killings.

Muslim Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians died in clashes with Ottoman soldiers beginning in 1915, when Armenia was part of the empire ruled from Istanbul, but denies hundreds of thousands were killed and that this amounted to genocide.

Reporting by Orhan Coskun and Tulay Karadeniz; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Andrew Heavens